Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to be able to finish the speech I started yesterday on the federal government's 2014 budget.
I will start with a quick summary of what I talked about yesterday. I provided an overview of Canada's economic situation. The government painted a picture of it, but the real picture is not as pretty as the government would have us believe. The last four budgets have been about austerity and cuts, and this budget is no different. The government is not trying to hide that fact. What it is trying to hide is the fact that its cuts are bad for economic growth and job creation.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer pointed that out in his latest reports to the House. The Parliamentary Budget Officer also pointed out that economic growth, or Canada's current economic performance, is about 1.6% lower than it would have been without the cuts. That might not seem like a big difference, but 1.6% amounts to tens of billions of dollars that did not contribute to economic growth and that were lost in terms of potential economic prosperity.
The Parliamentary Budget Officer is not the only one to have pointed that out. In its latest report, published in January, the International Monetary Fund clearly indicated that the Canadian government's austerity measures, including those in the previous budget, resulted in economic growth that was 10% to 15% lower than it would have been without those measures.
We can tackle growth and job creation if we delay balancing the budget until 2016 or 2017. Canada is still in a strong position compared to our partners, even though our situation is not as rosy as the government says. Still, when it comes to balancing the budget, the debt-to-GDP ratio, we can wait. That is what the International Monetary Fund said.
The government still says that we are leading the G7 on economic growth, but that is no longer true. The growth outlook puts us third, and we are sliding slowly because of the Conservative government's inaction. The OECD says the same thing: we are now in the middle of the pack, and other countries that have come up with more ways to promote growth and job creation are edging past Canada.
While our economic growth is stagnating, the federal government is turning a blind eye. The goal of this budget, the not-so-secret objective, is to achieve a balanced budget in 2015. The Conservative government's open secret is that it wants to have good news to spread in 2015, just in time for the election.
That is not the best way to run a country or to demonstrate good governance. That is not what it means to work for the common good of Canadians, but it is what the Conservative government has decided to do.
I would like to mention one final point to remind hon. members of what I was saying yesterday. I was shocked to hear one particular statement from the Minister of Finance during his budget speech, and I will repeat it again. The Minister of Finance said:
...our government remains committed to balancing the budget in 2015, but I must be clear. We did not do this on the backs of ordinary Canadians or Canadians in need...
How can the Minister of Finance say such a thing? I am well aware that, not only in my riding, but in my part of the country, massive cuts have been made to employment insurance. If the minister does not see that employment insurance provides assistance to people in need, then he is really out of touch. There have been significant cuts in other areas, too, including VIA Rail, Canada Post, Service Canada, veterans' services and food inspection, as well as in science and technology, which help Canada remain competitive in the world, both economically and in terms of technological advances. It is absolutely absurd for the minister to claim that the cuts made over the past four years have had no effect on ordinary Canadians or Canadians in need; on the contrary.
I just mentioned food inspection. There are a handful of measures in the budget that we actually agree with. Of course, as the government members rise to express their support for this budget, they will choose certain measures here and there, mentioning a given fantastic measure on a given page. They will probably choose measures that we agree with.
The main job creation and economic growth measures are not in the overall budget.
To come back to food inspection, we applaud one measure in particular, and that is adding inspectors to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. However, this measure speaks to the government's denial of certain situations.
It is good to add 200 inspectors and the equivalent of roughly $350 million or $360 million to improve food safety. The problem is that for two years, the government has been denying that its massive budget cuts have had any impact on food inspection. It is finally opening its eyes and including a measure in this budget to add 200 inspectors. What did they do for the 300 inspectors who have been laid off in the past two years? They did not say in their budget.
At the end of the day, we still have a lot of work to do to make this government realize that it has to have a direct hand in filling the gaps left by its previous budgets. It has to stop waiting two years to consider each major problem pointed out by the opposition.
I am also in favour of the measure to provide rural homes with high-speed broadband Internet access. I fully support that measure. Why did the government eliminate most of the Internet access programs that provided funding for using the Internet at rural libraries?
First, the government takes away an essential service from the rural regions for two or three years, and then it wakes up to the fact that the rural regions are suffering from this lack of access and decides to give them something. I look forward to seeing concrete results. Having 280,000 people connected to the Internet may seem like a lot, but countrywide it is not so much per riding.
We can get behind many measures that will be beneficial. The first budget implementation bill will probably be introduced in April. That is when we will be able to discuss it and see how the government would like to begin applying these measures.
Often the devil is in the details. If these measures are acceptable, we will support them in the Standing Committee on Finance. The government knows full well that the vote on budget implementation bills, like the vote on the budget itself, includes all the measures.
Although we can agree on some of the smaller measures that will be significant to the community, most of the major job creation and economic growth measures are just not in the budget.
I would like to close by talking about the government's approach to its different programs.
Take the job grant for example. Trying to connect the unemployed with jobs based on their skills is a noble objective. We agree. However, we are not talking about objectives; we are talking about how it is done. In terms of the job grant, which is a provincially run training program, the Minister of Finance said that it is the federal government's money and that it is going to spend that money as it pleases. Just imagine the resulting problems with implementing those key measures.
Once again, we agree that it is a good objective, but confronting the provinces in their own area of jurisdiction creates problems in implementing those measures. If those measures are needed now, the government members will agree with us that the provinces must be on board and consulted to ensure that the measures can be implemented as soon as possible.
Instead, what is the government doing? It is picking quarrels with the provinces. We saw all the provinces react right away. Let me say that they were also not happy with the Minister of Finance's comments after the budget was tabled. They did not understand.
This is not the only issue on which the Conservatives have failed to respect jurisdictions and to co-operate with the provinces. There is also the single securities commission. They have renamed it but it is still a move toward a centralized securities regulator. However, that too is an area of provincial jurisdiction, and the Supreme Court said so.
The federal government's role is to monitor the whole system, even though the provinces apply the rules. The provinces understand the importance of creating a synergy amongst themselves in order to ensure that we have a strong financial system that protects us, while creating as few obstacles as possible for investors.
The provinces work together. With a passport system, for example, an issue that creates a legal precedent can be recognized as case law in all provinces, and the accreditation of someone working in the field can be recognized across Canada, even if he or she works in one particular province. Co-operation among the provinces and the passport system have eliminated many obstacles.
Just imagine how quickly we could set up a system that would achieve the government's objectives, if it worked with the provinces that set up this system. Unfortunately, the government prefers its own system and is now looking for the provinces' co-operation. To date, only two provinces are working with the federal government while eight have declined.
How much time will we have to spend trying to convince some provinces that are not really willing to adopt this system, when we could have a system that would achieve the same objectives much more quickly if the government accepted the provinces' initiative?
That is not all. This budget would also eliminate the immigrant investor program. We can and should discuss the effectiveness of the program. However, in the end, the government made the decision without the provinces' agreement. Just yesterday, the Premier of Saskatchewan, Brad Wall, rejected the government's one-way initiative.
The government has no idea where it is currently headed or how a federation works. To achieve its objectives as quickly as possible, a federal government has to come to an agreement with the provincial governments and work with them. Instead, this government is being confrontational and as a result it will take much longer to develop the objectives and elements of good governance, even when that is possible.
In that sense, this budget clearly does not achieve the objective that a government should set for itself, that is, to focus government resources on economic growth and job creation.
They will talk it over and tell themselves that it can be done, but believe me, this budget will not meet any of its objectives. The only objective in this budget is the arbitrary objective to balance the budget in 2015, so that the Conservatives can hand out goodies and try to win over the Canadian public with their claims of good governance.
I guarantee you that the public will not be fooled and that at the next election in 2015 it will hear all about the lack of good governance.